Unexpected Detours and Wilderness Waits

Waiting has had its perks.

Our socks are wearing out.

It's December and I have no long sleeves.

Wearing summer clothes, back when it was still summer.

It's time to mail out Christmas cards and I have no return address.

Wearing summer clothes when it is NOT still summer with a borrowed jacket (and shoe).

These are not complaints. These are matter-of-fact observations about our life right now.

Way back in June, we threw the bulk of our belongings in a Pod, with the certain assumption that in a month or two we'd meet up again with our plentiful closets and favorite toys. So surely, we only needed a week's supply of summer clothing to see us through.

Leaving the parking lot after waving goodbye to our Pod. Notice, we didn't even have enough stuff to completely block our windows.

But it's been a lot longer than a month or two. The seasons have changed. The toddler has outgrown both pairs of shoes we brought along for him.  And me, well, I long ago outgrew my week's worth of clothing as I transitioned from barely pregnant and hiding it to third trimester waddle.

Clear proof that fortune cookies are sometimes flat-out wrong. I picked this beauty up in the early days of our with-out-home life.

It's not that I don't have maternity clothes. Or winter clothes. I've got plenty... all neatly boxed in a Pod parked somewhere in Wisconsin. And we have plenty of non-holey socks, sufficient to bury a washer and dryer.

If I could step into a picture, I would... just long enough to grab some of those warmer clothes.

Just not here... where we are.

None of our scenarios for what would happen after grad school included this stretch of waiting. But in this waiting, I find myself circling back to a blog post I wrote more than a year ago and never published. It was a blog post about God's provision, but I couldn't post it because I didn't want people to assume I was bragging. I even wrote a disclaimer post, thinking that then I could post the original. But I never did.

Now, in the midst of this waiting, this season of "But this doesn't make sense!" I come back to those words I wrote so long ago because of the original reason I wrote them down. I wrote that unpublished post to remember that God has helped us, so that when we forget (because we all do), I can look back and remember.

So, as I look at our clothes spilling out of the same suitcases they've spilled out of for the last six months, and I lesson plan for another week of home(less) schooling, and I pray that this round of interviews will result in a job offer... I finally bring that old blog post to the light of day. But do me a favor before you read it... go read the disclaimer first.

There is a popular money saving blog I follow that regularly has a feature titled, "We paid cash." In it, someone tells how they saved and scrimped on money in order to avoid using credit.

Frequently, I have imagined what my own story would look like if I wrote up our "We paid cash" story for sending SOS to grad school and having the other four of us tagalong.

Maybe I would start out by talking about selling our house... which we bought at the near-bottom of the housing market crash. Of course, the only way we managed to buy was with the help of the first-time homebuyers grant since the entire grant would suffice as a downpayment. And the only reason we bought was because we couldn't afford to rent in one of the most sought-after locations in the country. And then, once we owned the 473 square feet of loveliness, we just kept packing in the children while paying down the mortgage so that when we sold, we walked away with nearly half of the original purchase price.

Yep, I'm sure that's a scenario other frugally savvy people could copy... or maybe not.

So I'd have to start further back than that, talking about the amazing gifts of our parents (and grandparents) and grants which enabled both SOS and I to obtain Bachelor's degrees without student debt.

No, I guess that wouldn't fit either, because that certainly wasn't our doing.

So instead, maybe I'd better begin with the tale of SOS landing a TA position at his prestigious MBA program to cover his tuition and health coverage, plus a small stipend. But no, that wouldn't be showing our financial prowess either. There's no way he would accept credit for the miracle of scoring significantly higher on the real GMAT test than any of the practice ones... or just about any other part of the path that brought him to this particular grad school.

However I started, at some point I would surely need to mention how living in an ever-increasingly small, two bedroom student housing apartment played into our ability to pay cash for school. But living in the apartment certainly wasn't our first, second, third or even fourth choice. A three bedroom would be so much nicer... and come with a washer and dryer! Did we even qualify to rent a small two bedroom? With three kids, by law, we need three bedrooms, right? But some goofy legal glitch somewhere allows government owned apartment complexes to fit in an extra kid more than privately owned apartments. So yes, on a state school campus, we still qualified for a two bedroom and its lower rent.
Still, theoretically, we could have chosen to rent a larger place on campus or even venture off campus for more attractive options. Doesn't that prove that we had some pivotal role in debt free living by choosing to delay gratification?

Uh, no. We tried so very hard to find another option. But there was no other choice for us than a two bedroom in grad student housing. Again, not something we can take credit for.

And then there's the funny story of the summer internship for SOS. The pure ridiculousness of expecting a company to pay a summer intern sufficiently to support a family of 5 and cover rent in two places. (After all, if we gave up the previously mentioned two bedroom apartment at the beginning of the summer, who knows if there would be one available for us at the end of the summer?) Would we need to use a student loan just so we could live as a family while SOS completed his internship? Ha! Not even then! Because there just so happened to be a relative living within commuting range who happily let us stay ALL SUMMER LONG.

And don't even get me started about the long, convoluted story about how I managed to have a job where I could work from home even when that home moved two thousand miles. Because I know I can't take credit for that bit of our story.

So yes, we payed cash for two years of grad school and living expenses, but it certainly isn't because of clever strategizing on our part. I won't be submitting any inspirational story to that money blog as a model for how other families can send the primary breadwinner back to school. Because really, what in our "success" story was our doing?

I'd say about as much as the Israelites can claim for walking across the Red Sea on dry land.

The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the wilderness and their clothes and sandals did not wear out. Evidently, God has a different way of providing for us, as socks are definitely wearing out.